A fuzzy new standard for care plans

As inspectors increasingly insist that care plans must be ‘person-centred’, TOM COOPER says the Care Quality Commission should confine itself to ‘law-centred’ regulation.

In recent years the concept of ‘person centred’ care planning has come to the fore as a method of ensuring that care plans more accurately reflect the full range of service users’ needs and wishes, through fully involving them in the assessment and action-planning process in order to produce a bespoke document tailor-made for each individual.

This is a very good idea and has been steadily gaining ground in the care industry as best practice. However, as always with new technical terms and jargon, there are problems with the concept because there is no universally agreed definition of what ‘person centred’ actually means in practice.

Inspectors with the former regulator – the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) – first started making references to ‘person centred’ care plans in inspection reports on learning disability services about three years ago, latterly transferring the concept to the elderly sector with an increasingly authoritative and confident tone. Before long the first t